Search

Notice

Hey this is Joe again and I am back to report on another week with my business friends and kind of partners – My air conditioning and heating business has been booming lately and I have been super busy, but I have decided that I am going to make this group into a priority. I shouldn’t miss it because I think everyone there is devoted and invested in not only learning new business techniques but also meeting likeminded people they can become friends with. I have to admit that outside of Josh (the Lubbock lawn care expert) I don’t have many close friends. My high school buddies and college buddies have all pretty much moved away and I haven’t made the time to “replace” them with good people I can trust – even good people I can lean on to fill my mind with new ideas. So I am in like Flynn and I am thankful I even found about this group of guys. I heard about it from one of my workers and just showed up one time. I was immediately welcomed and it felt great to be there in a place I could be myself.

By the way, this is not a group that sees women business owners as unwanted because I am sure that they could bring a lot of great things to the group. But we wanted to keep it a closed male group for the sake of creating a brotherhood – they are rare these days. Maybe we can invite a woman or two to present their good ideas to us in the future. We will just have to see.

I sat next to Josh at the big community table in the coffee shop and before we officially began he showed me one of his new landscaping designs. He wanted my opinion on it and I was honestly shocked to see how creative this design was going to be for somebody’s yard. I did not know how the process worked for Lubbock landscapers who worked in the dry dirt of this city. I told him I was very impressed and he was happy to get my opinion.

Anyway, a guy named George who was a Lubbock catering expert, gave our short talk this morning and he spoke on the topic of being a Change Agent inside and outside of your business. He said that a change agent was a person who initiated and implemented change within an organization or culture. We all agreed just how hard it is to introduce change correctly within our businesses and we learned how to pique the interest of people at every stage of the change continuum (from early adopters to laggards). It was a fantastic talk that led to a ton of discussion amongst the group. Almost all of us admitted that we had never introduced and implemented change in this way and we all had bad stories to tell about disgruntled workers who preferred the old way to the new bosses’ way. We learned that it is a skill and an art form to bring change to culture and to our businesses. George told us to check out a book by Everett Rogers about change agency and innovation. I don’t know who else in the group is going to buy it, but I definitely am going to.